"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,..."

"If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed."

"To ensure control of the horse, long reins are used, but we are going to investigate the facts to ensure that the situation is, as we understand it to be."

"If it’s anything different, we will respond accordingly."

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorka

 

"The Biden administration’s continued use of Title 42 to justify sending people back to Haiti is out of step with public health best practice and international human rights law, If Biden doesn’t shift course, he risks making hollow his promise of a ‘whole-of-government initiative to address racial equity and support underserved communities, and redress systemic racism in federal policies, laws, and programs'."

"The U.S. government showed a total disregard for the right to seek asylum when it sent agents on horseback with reins flailing to control and deter this largely Black migrant population."

"This violent treatment of Haitians at the border is just the latest example of racially discriminatory, abusive, and illegal U.S. border policies that are returning people to harm and humanitarian disaster."

Alison Parker, U.S. managing director, Human Rights Watch

US Customs and Border Protection agents on horseback deployed against Haitian migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, September 19, 2021.  AP Photo/Felix Marquez

"The majority of migrants continue to be expelled under CDC’s Title 42 authority. Those who cannot be expelled under Title 42 and do not have a legal basis to remain will be placed in expedited removal proceedings."

"The Biden Administration has reiterated that our borders are not open, and people should not make the dangerous journey."

U.S.Department of Homeland Security

 

"[The situation is] no longer sustainable or acceptable."

"We now have [the equivalent of] one-third of the population of the city of Del Rio, Texas, in a confined space under the international bridge."

"I had thought the alarm was set on Monday but this is a nuclear bomb alarm."

Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano

Makeshift shelters at a temporary migrant camp under the international bridge in Del Rio on Sept. 17, 2021   Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune

Humanity is on the move from countries where human rights represents a notion for the delusional, where crime rages, where poverty is endemic, where inequality and discrimination are rife, where unemployment is high, education and medical care poor, where food and fuel are scarce commodities  and opportunities for quality of life rare to vanishing. Revolutions now fail to move a people utterly demoralized and led by tyrants. Syria's civil war produced millions of internally displaced and refugees hoping to find solace and haven elsewhere.

 

Central Americans have been leaving their impoverished countries in droves. Ideally, migrants escaping misery dream of life in the United States and set out on long, dangerous journeys overland to attempts to infiltrate the borders that were once, long ago, open to immigrants and refugees; the sight of the Statue of Liberty a balm for their souls, leaving Europe for a safe and secure home for generations to come. They're still entering the United States, now illegally, to claim refugee status through Mexico. 

 

Europe has had more than its share of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, desperate to escape the misery of life in their home countries and find a place for themselves where opportunities, they convince themselves, abound. They undertake difficult seaborne journeys fraught with danger. The open generosity of Western Europe, the suspicious denial of Eastern Europe absorbed or rejected the entry of the poor, uneducated, absent-skilled hopefuls. And with them the dangerously bitter whose religious and ideological cultures manifest in threats and violence.

 

In the best of all possible worlds countries select whom and from where they will accept as future citizens, looking for people from cultures adaptable to the heritage, culture and social systems of accepting countries. Those who are educated, who have the potential to advance the best interests of countries they join while taking advantage of the opportunities available to them, accepting values not originally their own, but which make them part of the country they have joined. 

There are, however, limits. Internal and external conflicts, terrorist threats, drug-smuggling, criminal gangs, poverty and scarcity are driving colossal numbers of people from their national homelands, seeking haven in the well-ordered, secure and wealthy democratic countries of the world whose largess has become legendary and in the process overwhelmed. And that describes the United States of America which already houses millions of undocumented migrants, illegal entrants to the country working in an underground economy.

Failed countries like Haiti provide no quality of life for their populations' where crime, corruption, and physical danger alongside natural disasters emulate the hellish world of Hieronymus Bosch, a dark, dysfunctional, ugly world of mere existence fraught with human misery. The impromptu migrant camp devised by Haitians who crossed the Rio Grande between Mexico and Texas might have appeared a logical and temporary stop to the migrants on their way to opportunity and plenty in the United States, but it is a fantasy come to an abrupt halt.

 

US Border Patrol agents on horseback have been trying to close off crossing points along the Rio Grande river   AFP

 

The gathering of 12,000 people, families huddling together in the exhausting heat, without access to hygiene, to food, to water, to medical supplies other than the inadequate amounts mustered by the town of Del Rio, overwhelmed the area, crushing their will to give aid to the suffering families who had ventured everything in the long arduous journey they undertook to reach a destination they thought would welcome them. "They can't send us back to Haiti because everyone knows what Haiti is like right now", Haitian migrant Wildly Jeanmary said, on the Mexican side of the river.

He, like hundreds of others, unwilling to be flown back to Haiti by American authorities, chose to return to Mexico in hopes he would be able to remain there, since entry to the United States was blocked. "The government of the United States has no conscience", another Haitian migrant, Herlin Clerge said, considering a return to Mexico with his wife and two small children. Their hopes of applying for asylum protection in the U.S. dashed, even as migrants continued to cross the river to the U.S.

Heightened security in response to the thousands gathered under the bridge linking Mexico to the U.S. failed to stop the migrants. Horse-mounted agents attempted to block migrants from clambering up the embankment from the river to U.S. soil. Carrying backpacks and plastic bags bulging with their worldly possessions, Monday saw a steady stream of Black Haitian migrants continuing to stream back into Mexico across the river. 

Haitian migrants arrive back in Port-au-Prince   Reuters